Cast out from their ship by Fletcher Christian and his rebel band, William Bligh and eighteen seamen were forced to journey thousands of miles to the nearest port in a small open boat, with inadequate supplies and without a compass or charts. This time-honored classic, written in 1790, is Bligh's personal account of an extraordinary feat of seamanship, in which he used a sextant, a pocket watch, and his own iron will to direct an ill-equipped vessel and crew to safety across nearly 4,000 miles of rolling sea.
Bligh's memoir also recounts the events of a routine voyage of scientific...